Nixon Visited Mar-A-Lago

Readers: The Nov. 10 article on presidential visits said Richard Nixon apparently never came north during his stays at his Key Biscayne vacation home. That prompted a call that led to James Griffin of Lake Clarke Shores. It turns out Nixon visited the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach on July 7, 1974.
Griffin, whose father was the previous supervisor of the estate, was raised on the property. He took over in the 1950s and ran the 17-acre estate until 1993. Marjorie Merriweather Post had left it to the federal government for possible use as a vacation White House when she died in 1973.
Nixon made the 35-minute flight from Key Biscayne, clips confirm. Two helicopters came up the Intracoastal Waterway from the south and landed on the golf course, Griffin recalled recently. The visit violated a ban on
helicopters landing on the island, but Nixon got a mulligan. Griffin said he showed Nixon around the estate for 30 to 45 minutes.
“He was very pleasant and thought the place was marvelous, but didn’t indicate one way or another whether he’d want to use it,” Griffin said.
He recalled later that the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, Palm Beach Police Department and the U.S. Coast Guard weren’t happy about having received only hours’ notice of Nixon’s visit. “But it was something he decided to do on the spur of the moment,” Griffin said.
A month after his visit, Nixon resigned in scandal. The feds gave Mar-a-Lago back to the Post estate in 1980. Five years later, Donald Trump paid $15 million for it. In 1995, he converted it to a private club.
By the way, the previous column notwithstanding, Nixon came to the county once before as president: in 1970, to campaign for local candidates in West Palm Beach.

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